Sharon Harper

Artist Statement

I use lens-based media to reflect upon ways we are woven into relationship with natural world, to pose questions, and to learn from images themselves. Being in relationship with a camera and the world provides distinctive ways of knowing. I use the camera to challenge the surface of images and shift. Some questions that recur are: How can we understand and imagine with lens-based media things we couldn’t access or understand without it? How can the camera be a partner in co-creating work? How can technology reveal our interrelatedness? Recently, I’ve looked at ways that cultural traditions arise from and are shaped by the land itself. The inter-relationship between spiritual and geologic qualities of a landscape shape belief systems, and those help determine how societies relate to the land. I am interested in learning ways that cultures offer lessons from living in reciprocity with precarity and the land.

Wetlands (Charles River), work-in-progress, 2025 Archival photographic print, 40” x 30”

Bio

Sharon Harper works at the intersection of technology, perception, and the living environment. Her work is in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Harvard Art Museums, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, California, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, The New York Public Library, and the Denver Art Museum among other collections. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, a Meredith S. Moody Residency Fellowship and an Elizabeth Ames Residency Fellowship at Yaddo, a Sam and Dusty Boynton Residency Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, and residency fellowships at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Monastery of Halsnøy, Norway and the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Kentucky. A monograph of her work, From Above and Below, was published by Radius Books. She is Professor of Visual Art, Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University.

sharonharperstudio.com